First, it's a lot harder to commit gang warfare with knives than it is guns. When's the last time you heard of a drive-by stabbing? How do you kill multiple gang members (and innocent civilians) when you have to walk up and stab them all without getting attacked yourself? Guns make killing and injuring people a lot easier than using virtually any other weapon.

Second, gun ownership is a risk to the gun owner. A gun owner is more likely to die by the gun (either through suicide or homicide) than to protect their family.

Third, you're considering only homicides. Firearm-related suicide attempts are the most fatal. Limiting gun ownership doesn't reduce the number of suicide attempts, but it does decrease the lethality of those attempts. Think about it: if you shoot yourself with a gun, you're at least going to the hospital, if not the morgue. And it's not just gun owners themselves, but their families. Morose teenagers should not have access to guns.

I don't actually have a problem with people owning guns, but I don't see them as trivial and harmless, and I certainly don't support unfettered access to them.

We're a Perl shop, and we also use automated tools (perltidy and soon, perlcritic) before committing. It's just easier if everybody uses the same tool to do the formatting and it's automatic. When you have to remember to do the style by hand, it's easy to forget.

The problem is that the GUI interface to the network has moved to different locations in different versions of Windows. In an IT department, you probably know what version of Windows is running, but with the public at large, they may have not a clue what version of Windows is running and how to access that information. Running ipconfig works on virtually every version of Windows. And to my knowledge, Windows has not provided a GUI interface to ping or tracert. Sure, there are third-party versions, but most systems don't have them installed, and if you're trying to troubleshoot a network problem, you probably can't just download them then.

Perl definitely has a C-like syntax. It was the first language I learned after C and C++.

GCC optimizes much better than clang. Also, despite defining __GNUC__, clang doesn't offer all of the features that GCC does. For example, a deal-breaker for the kernel is that it doesn't support explicitly assigning a variable to a register. Until it is usable across the board (including the kernel) and doesn't regress performance, distros are going to stick with GCC.

The sociological and political reason for marriage is that it recognizes and endorses strong family bonds. Having strong family bonds promotes a stable society. That's the argument for civil marriage. Religious marriage is an almost entirely different institution. It's just that in the US, we conflate the two too often because we allow clergy to act as officiants for civil marriages. In much of Europe, civil marriage can only be performed by a judge or government official.

Theora isn't as great a video codec as VP8 or H.264.

I totally agree with this policy. It's the same one that Debian uses to decide disputes over the name of a given binary: if both sides can't agree, then nobody gets it and both packages have to rename. It reminds me of a Law and Order episode where the judge said, "I know I've made the right decision when both sides are unhappy."

CBC, the most common chaining mode, has been around for a long time and has been studied a lot. So people use it a lot in protocols and specifications, and so people think it's a good idea to use it more, and so on. This is the same reason RSA has been used a lot. The problem with counter mode is that without a MAC or MIC, it is trivial to modify the plaintext without detection.

Uh, I don't think that's a good idea. It means that all downloadable software would be in the public domain. It would effectively prevent anyone from putting any sort of creative work online (written, photographic, etc.). The same goes for documentation, news stories, comics, useful web apps, etc. It would probably result in a much more closed web where everybody had to sign up to every site in order to just access it.

There's already a legal term for this. It's called the doctrine of laches. Basically, if you sit on your rights, you lose the right to enforce them. This is designed explicitly to avoid harming others that relied on your inaction.

Actually, the ICD-10 is created by the World Health Organization. The goal is to have a code for pretty much any medical-related concept not to increase overhead but to have a language-independent way of discussing and improving health. Determining the existence and spreading of public health issues is a lot easier when you can simply search medical records with a code.

Debian uses LDAP and does not use Kerberos. I presume that they store the passwords in LDAP in the standard fashion.

It depends on what you sue for. There is a thing called "specific performance," which is basically forcing the defendant to comply with the terms of the license or contract in cases where there is no adequate remedy in monetary damages. An injunction is also possible, and even likely, in copyright infringement cases.

Chrome does that, and I haven't seen any flamewars.